In today's cellular systems, downlink performance is becoming increasingly important with the emergence of downlink-bandwidth intensive applications. For example, efforts are being deployed to provide good user throughput in most of a coverage area. One challenge in those efforts involves setting a power of data communications in a way that allows optimal network utilization. For example, if one particular node communicates with a power that exceeds its needs and does more harm than good (with respect to network usage by an adjacent node), network utilization is not optimized.